The tile in my hall way was very badly installed. The first day we moved in I had to reglue down a tile. I've decided that I'm sick of looking at it and want to try my hand at some of the new laminate flooring, but first, I had to find out what was under there. My suspicion was that it was tile on plywood on the original hardwood floor and it seems that I was right.However there's the layer of black... stuff which I can only guess is tar. Since it's rubbery, it's hard to sand off and quickly clogs the paper. The nails used to hold down the plywood are also HUGE, so there are large nail holes in the underfloor. The edge near the stairs is also shattered, so it would have to be replaced if I restored the floor. I think it's not worth trying to restore the floor. It's a whole lot of work which might never come out looking good given the damage, but I open it up to anyone with some wisdom if I should try to restore it.

I purposefully did not order the laminate yet, since I thought this was a possibility. My plan is to lay it over the tar like substance as a floating floor, probably with some of the floating flood padding stuff.

If you decide to remove the rubbery stuff, you might try getting the "multifunction power tool" from Harbor Freight. (Google will find this.) Basically it's a hand tool that resonates at about 20 KHz. There's a scraper attachment that might do very well on rubbery stuff.

You might want to have someone check to see if the plywood is needed structurally? Some of the wood subfloorsthey would put in would then be sturdy enough to putanother wood floor or tile over, but not laminate flooring.

By the way, many of the laminate floorings had enough formaldehyde in them to give me a headache. Manning seemslike one of the few companies with a formaldehyde-free laminateflooring. One of the potential challenges of laminate flooring in a kitchen (unlike tile or real wood) is that water can do severe damage to them.